June 27, 2008

Human Flesh Search Engines in China

In China, online vigilantes, or “netizens,” use the Internet as a “human flesh search engine” to find and punish people who publish material they consider inappropriate.

“Human Flesh Search Engine” is an imprecise translation of “ren'rou sou'suo,” which can be translated as “human-assisted search engine.” In China, though, the Internet is searched by people to hunt down other people and conduct muckraking campaigns. A mob of Chinese ‘netizens' tracked down and punished a 21-year old video blogger whose clip they deemed unpatriotic.

Gao Qianhi, a 21-year old Chinese woman, recently posted an online video of herself complaining about the huge amount of TV coverage of the southwest China earthquakes: “You guys, if you're hit by the rubble, just go suffer by yourself quietly.”

Hours later, intimate details about Ms. Qianhi's life were spread across the Internet.

With internet mobbing, the victim's personal information is published to a broad audience, along with derogatory comments and death threats.

While Internet mobbing occurs in other countries, the movement appears to be particularly powerful in China because large-scale human flesh search engines are unique to are made easy by ubiquitous manpower and China's ingrained tradition of ‘people's war' dating back to Mao, along with a justice system that's less than perfect.

Hat tip to search engine Finding Dulcinea for uncovering this terrific story.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

November 28, 2006

Exalead CEO Warns Of "Google Monster" & Closed Yahoo & Microsoft

The Multilingual Search Blog covers Exalead CEO Francois Bourdoncle taking a big stick and swinging at Google in a keynote talk at SES Paris. He positions his own service as potentially the savior for those in Europe worried about the "Google monster." Beyond Google, he also criticizes Yahoo and Microsoft for collaborating on a "closed" sitemaps protocol. I'd say the Cold War against American-based search engines is going up a notch.

Let's deal with the Google Monster idea first:

The press in particular should be worried about becoming sub-contractors of Google, he said. Whilst at present Google News brings plenty of traffic to sites under the brand names of the press outlets, this would change to Google's brand in the future.

Actually, Google News has always operated under the Google brand. So much for that secret Google master plan, I guess. In fact, despite using the Google brand, I just covered some stats yesterday showing how Google sends upwards of 22 percent of traffic to newspapers sites.

Of course, Bourdoncle may have meant that in the future, Google will actually host content on Google itself, saving people from making a click through to news sites. Possible. And if so, ironically the newspapers may have themselves to blame. Go back to my write-up about the AP deal with Google. How exactly Google will make more use of AP content remains to be seen. But I explained that there's good reason that Google might host AP content on Google itself, similar to what Topix does.

Google's largely seen to have cut the AP deal in part because the AP may have been threatening legal action. Do a deal, the issue over spidering goes away -- and Google can host news content on its own site. As more companies clamor for deals (such as in Belgium this week), Google might transform into a content hosting service rather than pointing to content elsewhere.

By the way, Yahoo News already operates this way, hosting plenty of news content of its own. So even if Google goes that route, why haven't news organizations been complaining about the Yahoo monster? My guess would be that once you cut deals to host content, you seem less monstrous. And that works again against what Bourdoncle warns. If Google does host content, the news organization should be happy given they will have done the partnering to make that happen.

Bourdoncle isn't the only search engine to swing a torch around to rally the villagers against the Frankenstein's monster of Google. Microsoft just did this last month. CEO Steve Ballmer positioned Google as "transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders." Microsoft, of course, does much of the crawling and content gathering that Google does. It's hard to see how it is somehow more altruistic.

Such statements make good headlines, and I'd say they're going to play even better in Europe, which has watched the search industry rise into generating billions of dollars for America, rather than euros for Europe. There are also some serious cultural and political issues to consider. Many people may simply be more comfortable using a service that grew natively from their own country. I don't discount these worries and have great respect for them. I just dislike much of the scare mongering I also see that often feels like politicians and private companies hoping to position their own agendas, rather than a common good.

Such worries are one reason the Quaero project emerged, a planned multimedia search engine that will get government funds. I've likened this to being a Boeing versus Airbus challenge in the search world -- and also covered how Europe has had no lack of native technology already that grew without government subsidies.

Exalead is part of the Quaero project, though I remain confused about how to find more about it and what exactly it is doing. There used to be a site here that brings up nothing but a logon page. I've also seen the Quaero.org site referred to as the home of the project. That's entirely in French and German, and my German remains pretty bad. But I'm pretty sure I don't even see the word Quaero mentioned there.

Anyway, it's long been on my list to catch-up on the project. Chris Sherman's out in France today, and I think he's actually planning to talk with Exalead about Quaero more. So stay tuned.

Finally, Google wasn't alone for criticism:

He also criticised the new sitemaps collaboration announced by Google, Yahoo and MSN at Pubcon in Las Vegas. He said, “The sitemaps specification is not nice and open and it not nice and closed”. He believes the initiative aims to close the door to new entrants to the market place.

Frankly, I disagree. Google's had a sitemaps system out for over a year. In that time, I heard not one word out of Exalead that it thought it made sense that this should be expanded to be supported by other search engines. Now Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to a common specification. Exalead could jump into supporting that now, if they wanted. They could also produce a rival format, if they wanted (and what joy that would be). But instead, what they support is a single page-by-page submission feature. Criticizing a bulk submission feature of your rivals when you offer none of your own doesn't win points in my book.

Instead, I'd say the real issue is that Exalead didn't get to sit at the big table in working out the agreement along with the other three. That is unfortunate, just as I felt Ask should have been included as well. Exalead is an excellent search engine that deserves the attention of both searchers and the search engine industry alike -- as is Ask.

Not being included from the start was unfortunate, but forgivable, as long as we see a working group expand going forward. I'm all for that, though I don't want expansion to slow things down. It also makes sense that the market leaders -- the services with the most queries and thus the most attention from site owners -- are going to take the lead in these things.

Postscript: Quest for a Euro-Google from the BBC earlier this year provides a longer look at Quaero and Exalead's involvement.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:23 AM | Permalink

July 12, 2006

Google Video Launches In UK & Other Countries

Silicon reports that Google Video has launched a localized version in the UK at http://video.google.co.uk/. There are also localized versions in Canada, Deutschland, España, France, Italia, Nederland, and Polska.

Google's Joanna Shields, said in a statement: "By launching Google Video in these new markets we will enable more people in more countries to search for, upload and share video content in more languages."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:43 PM | Permalink

June 25, 2006

France's Géoportail Mapping Site: La Demande C'est Fantastique!

The French answer to Google Earth, the indirectly government funded Geoportail, launched Friday and was immediately overwhelmed with visits from eager French citoyens (citizens) and other curious would-be users. After several visits to the site this weekend, I was still unable to get in to see anything. Each time I tried I encountered this message: "Vous êtes incroyablement nombreux à vous connecter au Géoportail, portail des territoires et des citoyens depuis sa mise en ligne." In my broken French it roughly translates: "An incredible number of you have connected to Geoportail, portal of the territories and the citizens, since the site came online."

In other words, revenu plus tard (come back later).

Here are some screenshots of the different map views, including Birds Eye-like angled aerial photography. Built by the government funded Insitut Geographique National for a reported Euro 6 million (roughly US$7.51 million), the site offers detailed maps, geographic and other data and high-resolution aerial photography of France and French territories abroad. Reportedly the resolution goes down to 20 inches, which I believe is the best currently available in France and perhaps the whole of Europe (though Microsoft's Vexcel camera goes to 6 inches).

A 3-D tool is apparently being introduced later in the year.

Although I haven't been able to use it, the reports and descriptions suggest that it's a potentially worthy competitor to Google, Yahoo and MSN mapping tools in France.

If you can read French and want to look at the press materials and some Quicktime videos related to the site, you can see those here.

Here's more from Gary Price at ResourceShelf, who reminds us of other sites that map France, including France Télécom's PagesJaunes street-level photography (like A9's Block View).

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:46 PM | Permalink

June 20, 2006

Canada's YellowPages.ca Launches New Local Search Site

Since this is Local Search Day at Search Engine Watch, here's some additional news. Canada's yellow pages publisher, Yellow Pages Group, which also operates city guides and a variety of other Canadian web destinations, has launched a new beta version of its flagship site, YellowPages.ca. The new interface is considerably more appealing and the new site has a number of improvements, outlined in the press release. YellowPages.ca provides the content for Google Maps/Local and MSN in Canada.

You can also read some additional detail on my blog.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 9:32 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

Japan To Build Own Search Engine With 30 Japanese Companies & Government Help

The Mainichi Daily show that Japan is going to be building out their own search engine after conducting a focus group on the idea. Thirty organizations in Japan and the University of Tokyo will be working to develop the Japanese based search engine. Part of the group includes big brands such as Hitachi, Fujitsu and Nippon. The Japanese government plans on providing a subsidy for the project. Why? "Many people in Japan fear that the domination of the three firms will prevent Japanese companies from entering the market." The European Union, led by France, is doing something very similar.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:40 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Yahoo En Español & Telemundo.com To Merge

The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo En Español and Telemundo.com will be merging companies. They will be merging the staff and sharing one advertising budget. If you visit http://espanol.yahoo.com/ now, you will find both logos at the top of the page, representing each company. The reason for the merger is because the online Hispanic market is growing extremely quickly and the two companies want to take advantage of "the incredible growth of the Hispanic marketplace," today. It appears that the two companies will fold under the Yahoo umbrella.

We have been reporting on the Hispanic market growth recently. You can find out more by reading here and here.

Postscript: PaidContent.org has some more details on the merger plans.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:45 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2006

Google Not Tops In South Korea

Google fails to make inroads in South Korea from the Associated Press is a interesting look at how there's at least one country where Google is not tops or a major player: South Korea. Instead, the human-based Naver service remains far-and-away the most popular.

It's the one exception I know of where a question-answering model has succeeded and thrived, compared to those run by Google and Yahoo. The relatively small slice of the web in Korean, along with apparently poor automated search technology initially, has allowed Naver to succeed.

The story touches on Google's efforts in the country, including the promotional Google Bus that was sent around. You'll find more about Naver from us here: An Internet Search Company Hotter than Google? A Profile of Korea's NHN and Naver.com

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:25 AM | Permalink

April 26, 2006

Arabic Language Search Engine ETA Q4 2006

News.com reports on plans to building an Arabic language search engine called "Sawafi" by the end of this year. This will be reportedly the first search engine (non-directory) to search the web, for Arabic content. They believe that adding this search engine will not boost Arab internet usage and increase the Arabic online advertising market to $150 million in 2008 from $10 million, as of today.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:11 AM | Permalink

March 27, 2006

UK Internet Users Really Love Google; 75% Use Google

ThreadWatch covers a WebSideStory study that shows Google captured 75% of UK market share in February 2006. The breakdown amongst the top five in the UK include; Google with 74.67%, Yahoo with 9.30%, MSN with 5.46%, AOL with 4.21% and Ask with 2.28%. This is based on search referrals from about four million daily Internet users in the UK "that use a search engine to reach another site on the web," the study says. No wonder Google was voted the best brand on the Internet by UK users.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:28 AM | Permalink

March 23, 2006

Yandex, Popular Russian Search Engine, To IPO

Nick Wilsdon notes that Yandex is set to IPO shortly. Yandex is Russia's most popular search engines with 62% market share. The Moscow Times reports that they have spoken with Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank. They may be listed on the NASDAQ, where Yandex’s "international peers trade".

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:09 AM | Permalink

January 25, 2006

Ask Jeeves Launches (Beta) German Site

It's official, but not a total surprise, since Barry first blogged reports about new European versions of Ask Jeeves appearing throughout Western Europe last month.

Today, Ask Jeeves has "officially" released Ask Germany (Deutschland) in beta.

You'll quickly spot an image of Mr. Jeeves on the home page but the service makes no other mention of the butler except this page with a history of the character.

Many of Ask's features available elsewhere are available on the German site including the binoculars feature, cached pages (with a date and time stamp), My Jeeves, and direct access to the German interface to Bloglines that also lists the number of unread messages in your Bloglines account on the AJ Deutschland home page.

Ask Jeeves Deutschland also offers an image search database and web page translation.

The main search box on the home page offer options to search only pages from Germany, only German language pages, or the entire web. This preferences page allows the user to change the number of results on a search results page and to activate the Internet filter. More about AJ Deutschland here. I was unable to spot an advanced interface page.

The official news release is here.

Germany has the greatest number of Internet users in Europe, with more than 42 million people online, and we believe it will be a very important market for the growth of Ask search technology and the Ask brand," said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, Inc.

Last March, AJ/Ask launched Ask Jeeves in Spain and in 2004 Ask Jeeves in Japan. Btw, AJ is also testing their own Bloglines blog/feed search engine in Japan.

Finally, the SER post from December points to more European versions of AJ that haven't been officially released including Ask France and Ask Netherlands.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:58 PM | Permalink

January 20, 2006

An Internet Search Company Hotter than Google? A Profile of Korea's NHN and Naver.com

NHN: The Little Search Engine That Could, from BusinessWeek offers a profile of NHN Corp/Naver.com a company that the article says is beating Google by one metric.

While the Silicon Valley sensation doubtless had a great year in 2005, shares of a Korean rival -- NHN Corp. -- have done far better. Google Inc.'s stock climbed an impressive 103% in 2005, to nearly $415, but that paled beside NHN's 218% gain to $267

+ "Google's 4-year-old Korean-language search service accounts for less than 2% of search page views and search-related ad revenues in Korea."

We know that Google is working to build share in Korea. For example, last year they ran a Google Bus Tour heading to several universities. Google Korea also debuted its own blog in '05.

+ The article says that NHN can offer more relevant answers than Google because their results pages place various types of content on results pages. I'm not so sure this is something that, at least on some Google sites, they aren't also doing with the OneBox. The same is also true at Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves where you might find news headlines, inline images (from their image databases), and factual answers listed on web results pages.

+ "Google has a superb search engine," says Choi Jae Hyeon, NHN's search chief. "We have, however, built up know how and a database by extracting knowledge from users' brains."

+ Extracting knowledge from users' brains is part of a three year initiative called "Knowledge-In" which in essence is a knowledgebase of asked, answered and rated (by users) questions.

This database now has some 37 million questions and answers that can get returned with search results. The article mentions that Yahoo Korea now offers a similar service. Don't forget that Yahoo just launched Yahoo Answers a few weeks ago and Google has Google Answers. Community oriented Q&A services like Wondir also have been around for some time.

Before any of these services existed Ask Jeeves offered (the now defunct) Answer Point. More Q&A and "virtual" answer services are listed here.

+ Some or several large web engine (take your pick) should leverage the content from expert driven databases that offer answers from an expert in a specific subject. Makes sense. Some of these services are listed here. One could also argue that Wikipedia is a place where a subject expert can share their knowledge.

+ The article mentions that NHN is also operating in Japan, China, and the US with online games site.

From the article: Already in Japan, NHN is the largest game portal, with 13 million subscribers, while in China it bought half of Ourgame.com, a portal with 170 million subscribers, in 2004. And in October it set up a subsidiary in the U.S. to launch online games. Later, NHN hopes to introduce community sites and search services in those markets. Google may still be far ahead, but it would do well to keep an eye out for this little Korean search engine.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:54 PM | Permalink

January 13, 2006

Quero's Web Site Goes into Hiding

It was just the other day when I posted links to a couple of articles about Quaero, the multimedia engine that's being developed in Europe by several companies including Thomson. Our post also included a link to the Quaero web site where you could learn more. If you go to the Quaero site today, it's only accessible if you have a password. What happened?

Thanks to Staci Kramer over at PaidContent.org for pointing to this IDG article that says the site the recent press attention and scrutiny that the service (informational only) was receiving did not make Frank Dangeard, the chairman of Thomson, happy According to the article he's imposed a "news blackout" and made the informational site password protected.

"There's been a lot of noise and our chairman decided we should stop making any comments until a more official press event," said Thomson spokesman Philippe Paban.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:06 PM | Permalink

January 11, 2006

Quaero, the European Developed Multimedia Engine, Gets Press Attention

An AP story as well one in Pandia discuss, Quaero, a multimedia engine in development, that's being billed as "Europe's answer to Google."

Quaero is set to be a multimedia engine so a direct comparison with Google seems off the mark. However, the word Google in a story gets people to pay attention.

Btw, this the same search project that Danny first blogged about first blogged about last August and again in September where he points out that France's Thomson once owned a multimedia search engine named Singingfish which is now owned by AOL.

From the AP: So far Quaero is just a scattering of top tech minds in labs across France and Germany, working on what they hope will be the world's most advanced multimedia search engine.

"We must meet the global challenge of the American giants Google and Yahoo," [French President Jacques] Chirac said in an address last week laying out his policy priorities for 2006. But details are scant. None of the key players -- including Thomson, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom -- would comment on cost.

Yes, that's the same Thomson that once owned Singingfish.

Lars Våge is much more positive about the project in his Pandia post versus the AP story:

From Pandia: A presentation of Quaero will be held at the Agance de l?innovation industrielle (AII) in January.

Will Quaero to some extent be able to recognize the contents of an image? Any way it seems that Quaero has more advanced technology in this area than e.g. Yahoo! or Google. Several companies are involved in the Quaero project along with Thompson. AFP?s article mentions Deutsche Telecom, France Telecom, and the search engine Exalead. This is very promising ? Exalead has an interface that makes Google look out of date. Quareo means search in Latin and it will be exciting to do just that when Quero is launched. This will hopefully happen in spring.

Learn more: Direct to Quaero's home page.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:09 PM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Ask Jeeves Drops "Jeeves" Part In France

We know that Ask Jeeves has promised a rebranding to come, with the smart money being on shortening the name to Ask and showing Jeeves the butler the door. Now Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable spots a Cre8asite forum discussion remarking how in France, it's simply Ask France -- not Ask Jeeves France. Barry also finds the same in Japan and Spain.

The French site went up earlier this month, as Abondance reports in French here. Still no sign of it being Ask With ExpertRank technology, however. We talked about how that might be coming here: Ask Jeeves To Rebrand Tech As ExpertRank Inside? As for the butler, while he might be out of the name, he's still featured prominently on the home page.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:00 AM | Permalink

December 23, 2005

German SEO Forums Launched

Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Heute hab Ich gelernen ThomasB hat ihre neue SEO "forums" hier: Online Marketing Talk. And now you know why native German speakers grimace -- including my brother-in-law -- when I try out my two years of college German on them. You want to talk suchmaschinenoptimierung? That's a new place to check out.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:21 AM | Permalink

December 19, 2005

Japan's Government Forms Study Group To Determine if Country Should Launch Its Own Search Engine

Both the AP and Agence France Press report that Japan's government is asking both the business and education/research sectors if the country should develop its own search engine technology and a service that's "unique to Japan" to compete with AJ Japan, Google Japan, Yahoo Japan, and others.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will convene a study group consisting about 20 Japanese electronics companies and universities on Internet search engines, said Fumihiro Kajikawa, a ministry official in charge of information policies...The Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper reported Monday that the government plans to spend tens of millions of dollars for a three-to five year project to develop a search engine beginning in fiscal 2007.

Btw, a very recent American entry into Japan's search market comes from Vivisimo. About three weeks ago we posted that a Japanese version of Clusty went live in late November. We also know that Ask Jeeves is currently testing their new blog search engine in Japan.

Postscript (from Danny): See also France To Fund European Search Engine; Replay Of Boeing-Airbus In The Search World? covering an earlier, similar concern that France sees in developing its own search industry.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:00 PM | Permalink

November 29, 2005

Blog On French Search Industry

Via Xooglers, former Googler Franck Poisson is running a French-language blog that covers the search industry, obviously of interest to anyone watching search and France. Long standing site French search site Abondance is well worth checking out, as well. The new Multilingual Search Blog is another resource French search watchers will also want to visit.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:18 AM | Permalink

November 18, 2005

Coverage of of CNET Japan Search Conference

The CNET Japan Fall Innovation Conference is currently underway and Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal is doing his very best to offer coverage of many search-related sesssions. Kudos Loren! Lots of interesting reading. So far he's posted presentations from Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Microsoft, Google and others. Here are direct links to his posts so far:

+ Microsoft?s Marketing Vision

+ Yahoo Japan: Social Media Search

+ Mobile & Local Japan Search

+ Ask Jeeves Search & Web 2.0

+ Blog Session at CNET Japan Search Conference

+ Google Global: Open Source, API, Mission

Posted by Gary Price at 2:26 PM | Permalink

November 10, 2005

Yahoo China Relaunched With Pure Search Focus & New Majority Owner

Yahoo China has been acquired by Alibaba.com and relaunched as a pure search service. Here's the rundown on the changes and some reasons behind the handout, which still leaves Yahoo itself earning off the site.

Back in August, Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba. That gave Yahoo a 40 percent stake in the company.

At the end of October, there was a UPI report that Alibaba bought up all the assets of Yahoo China for $1 billion. But I think that was reported backwards and working off the August announcement.

If you look at the release of the August deal, it talks of Yahoo "contributing" Yahoo China to Alibaba. So I think UPI had it wrong. This other report covers how the deal was concluded at the end of October.

Skipping ahead, via Shak's China White blog, Yahoo! China has 8 months to better Baidu or it's 'game over,' says Alibaba CEO covers the relaunch, as does Yahoo China back to search engine market found via Threadwatch.

The first article covers Alibaba feeling they've got about a year to have a chance in search in China and how the more pure search site will also focus on financial news, entertainment and sports. And political news?

I don't want to get into trouble with the government, so I don't do any political news," said Ma. China requires special certification to publish political news.

It's not all abandoning portal features, however. Email is also being kept, as that's seen as a key portal feature that can't go away.

Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny who is in Taiwan, heard about the move from his cab driver and was surprised to see that Yahoo China has gained an MP3 search tab.

No surprise, really. China's most popular search engine, Baidu, has built its popularity on music search -- or some would say illegal downloads -- as I covered in my Google's China Situation Better Than You Might Think -- And Other China Search News post. The question really is, will the new Yahoo China feature music content but not get into the same trouble Baidu's had with music companies.

I took a fast look to see if I could find any pirated songs, but needing to log into a Yahoo China account lost me, I'm afraid. If you have to log in, I'm guessing pirated music is less likely.

Finally, doesn't it seem odd for Yahoo to be handing over Yahoo China to another company when just this week, it bought out control of Yahoo UK, Germany, France and Korea from Softbank?

Nah. I'm guessing it's a handy way for Yahoo to profit off of China but get free of all those pesky complaints that Yahoo bends to China's will on political issues. Hey, we didn't hand that email over to the Chinese government. We didn't censor those news results. We didn't filter those search results. Alibaba did -- take it up with them! Yet by owning a stake in Alibaba, Yahoo can earn money of the search business.

As a reminder, Google owns a stake in four percent stake of Baidu. That gives it a bit of a hedge in case Google China doesn't work or the entire Yahoo keeping your distance situation -- if I'm reading that situation right -- looks worthwhile to follow.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:17 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2005

UK: Thomson Directories Now Powering Local Search Results On Tiscali UK

A quick note from the UK search scene. Netimperative reports that Thomson Local listings are now being used for local searches on the Tiscali UK site. Web results on Tiscali UK come from Google.

The service is accessed from Tiscali’s home page. Users enter the type of business and location they are looking for and select the ‘UK businesses’ option from the drop down menu alongside the search box. The results page shows the Thomson pay per click advertisers appearing at the top of the page, with online directory listings displayed on the left hand side. Priority is given to advertisers.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:50 PM | Permalink

October 20, 2005

Local Search and Online Reservation Services: A Winning Combination?

Netimperative has an article about a new service from the popular UK directory 192.com (they also offer aerial photos) that now offers you the ability to search for a restaurant (about 1300 are currently available) and then make a reservation online. Web-based online reservations are not a new idea. For example, OpenTable here in the U.S. offers online reservations for more than 3000 restaurants. Other companies also offer similar services. That said, I wouldn't be surprised that with the combination of several popular topics these days including, local search, mobile access, Wi-Fi, location-based services, VoIP, and even pay-per-call to some degree, it wont be very long before some of the large search companies are providing online reservations for restaurants and other events. Remember, Ask Jeeves parent IAC/InterActive also owns Ticketmaster and CitySearch. Talk about synergy!!! Heck, with Google Ride Finder you could even have a taxi or car service waiting to take you to and from dinner. (-: Direct links to online reservations seems like a no-brainer for many of the big search players.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:09 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

Shopping Engine Become.com Plans Move Into Japanese Market

Word in this Red Herring report that Michael Yang and the shopping research/comparison shopping engine, Become.com has plans to expanded into the Japanese search marketplace. The move is in partnership with Japanese information technology services firm, Transcosmos.

He [Yang] said his company chose to enter Asia through Japan because it was a bigger market than China. However, he said that Become also has plans to expand in China, but did not specify a time frame....Become Japan will be headquartered in Tokyo, and will launch with a staff of 15 in a 2,000-square-foot office.

Recently, Smarter.com, also in the shopping search space, announced plans to expand their presence in the Chinese marketplace. Alan Wallace from Smarter.com also alerts me to the fact that Smarter.com has been working in the Japanese marketplace for about six months.

More in the article: Become Expands in Japan.

For more about Become.com's offerings, see the SearchDay article: Become.com Offers Comparison Shopping.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:29 PM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

Infospace & Seekport Announce Partnership as InfoSpace President Leaves Company

Netimperative reports that European engine Seekport and Infospace will partner. The partnership will have Infospace providing paid listings on Seekport results pages.

This has been a busy week for InfoSpace news. On Monday, we blogged about a new mobile search tool that InfoSpace plans to launch in October. Then, on Tuesday, we learned that Kathleen Rae, president and chief operating officer of InfoSpace, will be retiring from the company.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:24 PM | Permalink

September 22, 2005

Country-Specific Search Engines & Telephone Directories

Phil Bradley's updated his Country Based Search Engines page, so if you're looking for a search engine serving a particular country, it's a good resource to consult. Phil also turned me on to another good resource a few months ago, Infobel's guide to telephone directories around the world.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:34 AM | Permalink

September 7, 2005

Hey President Chirac -- French-Based Thomson Sold Off Search Technology You Now Want To Fund

Earlier I wrote of the French government wanting to provide loans to help develop a European-based multimedia search engine, an effort to help counter perceived threats to French and European culture by the dominance of US search firms. Something was nagging at me. Why did French firm Thomson -- one of the partners seeking loans for the new service -- sound so familiar. Oh, yes. It's because Thomson used to own a multimedia search engine. Perhaps you've heard of it. Singingfish.

That's AOL-owned Singingfish. Thomson bought the company in 2000 (with nary a word about European encroachment into the US search industry), then sold it to AOL in 2003 (with nary a word about undermining French ability to protect its culture through search in the process).

So now having owned multimedia search technology and sold it, Thomson needs loans to start afresh? Maybe it could use the proceeds from selling the multimedia search technology it used to own?

Want to comment, discuss, tell me to jump in a lake? Visit our forum thread, French Loans To Back European Rival To US Search Players.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:52 PM | Permalink

Yandex Big In Russia, Google Gaining

The new Multilingual Search blog has a short brief on Russian search engine Yandex, apparently the most popular in the country. But Google is gaining. It points to a stats service here for Russian search engines. I can't say how valid the figures are or not. The Multilingual blog provides a bit more about the stats service here, as well as much more on Yandex.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:01 AM | Permalink

August 31, 2005

France To Fund European Search Engine; Replay Of Boeing-Airbus In The Search World?

Reading my copy of the Daily Telegraph today, I came across news that French President Jacques Chirac has pledged funding a new European search engine to challenge Google, Yahoo and other Anglo-Saxon search threats.

I guess Chirac sort of forgot about French-based Voila, which I believe still uses its own Francophone technology and which also apparently is number two in France. How about Seekport, the European-based search company that runs several multi-language editions? Fireball's an old favorite, a German-based service that had its own technology, though I'm not sure what it's using now. FAST is the Norwegian-based company that gave birth to AllTheWeb, now owned by Yahoo, but which still has web search technology it provides to others like Miva.

Chirac backs eurocentric search engine is the Telegraph article with a few more details. Specifically, Chicac doesn't seem to want to fund an actual web search engine. Instead, he wants to give loans so a French-German partnership between Thomas and Deutsche Telekom can build a "multimedia search engine for the internet." A Bloomberg story says the loans would be about 2 billion euros.

In short, there's plenty of search savvy in Europe that seems to have been OK without governmental support. But if the loans go ahead, it will be interesting to see if we're about to have a trade war emerge in the search space and over government backing, similar to the arguments that are made about government support given to aircraft makers Airbus in Europe and Boeing in the US.

The article has a few more details on the plans for a French-backed library digitization project, as well, as does France pushes for European books online. For past coverage on that from us, see:

• France, Google & The Need for Digitization Project Cooperation
• German Publishers Plan Major Book Digitization Project
• European Libraries Back Alternative To Google Library Project

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread, French Loans To Back European Rival To US Search Players.

Postscript: See also my later post, Hey President Chirac - French-Based Thomson Sold Off Search Technology You Now Want To Fund

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:56 AM | Permalink

July 28, 2005

Yahoo Partners With ITV & Rounding Up TV Search Partners In The UK

News from Yahoo that ITV -- on of the UK's major television channels -- will be featuring Yahoo search results, search ads and contextual ads on its site. At the moment, search listings appear to come from Miva -- the former Espotting.

FYI, Yahoo also has a presence with the BBC, which operates the UK's two most popular terrestrial (broadcast over the air) channels. That's Yahoo's search technology under the hood over at the BBC, or at least that's been the situation for some time. Paid inclusion is stripped out, and there are no ads (this is the BBC, after all) and the ranking algorithm gets tweaked.

A Day In The Life Of BBCi Search from Martin Belam is an older (2003) look at the service but still a good read. I haven't heard that Yahoo's been replaced, and I was just up at the BBC about three months ago, so I think things are still going along as before. Check out Martin's more recent posts on search and the BBC, as well.

How about Channel 4, the other major UK broadcast channel. No web search at all, it seems. To busy doing Big Brother edition 201 to think about it, I supposed. Well, no doubt Yahoo and Google will stumble over themselves to swoop in soon.

That leaves five, the last major UK channel that never has anything worth watching other than the occasional good cartoon in Milkshake. The all-graphic home page has no search box and digging in further shows nothing.

Now Sky, there's a much more major network than five, especially in bringing me US imports only a few months after they show in the US (and we got Battlestar Galactica first, yeah!). That's all on Sky 1, which lots of people take -- but Sky runs a number of other channels plus the UK's most popular satellite TV system. Search partner on the Sky web site? Nada that I see. Someone make Rupert an offer!

Finally, once again I have no luck finding the actual Yahoo press release of the news online, so I'll cut and paste below. All PR people everywhere. Put the release online! And send a URL to the online version as part of the release you send. Yahoo's far from the online one at fault like this.

ITV INTEGRATES YAHOO! SEARCH ON ITV.COM

Yahoo! provides a suite of its award winning search technology, alongside search monetisation products from it?s Overture subsidiary

London, July 28, 2005 ? Yahoo! UK & Ireland Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), today announced an agreement with ITV, the UK?s biggest commercial television network to provide search technology, sponsored search and contextual advertising on ITV.com.

ITV.com users visiting sites such as itv.com/soaps, itv.com/motor, itv.com/football, dedicated programming websites for I?m A Celebrity?Get Me Out Of Here! along with other sites within ITV Online?s portfolio will benefit from a Yahoo! Search box at the top of each page on the website. Visitors to the site will be able to search the wealth of content within the ITV.com website or extend their search to include the World Wide Web, including image, video and news content.

In addition to Yahoo?s Search box, the site will also display Overture?s sponsored search listings on both the search results page and throughout the ITV.com site as contextual advertising.

?We are pleased to be working with ITV, one of the UK?s biggest media properties,? said Rob Jonas, Head of Business Development, Yahoo! Search, UK & Ireland. ?This agreement demonstrates the growing strength of our search technology, as well as our commitment to work with partners to deliver compelling search user experiences. This should be the first of what we hope will be many agreements with popular online properties.?

Commenting on the deal, Jeremy Rosenberg, Online Sales Account Manager at ITV Sales said: ?The ITV integrated search partnership with Yahoo is the first time ITV.com has fully embraced all elements of search functionalities. The integrated approach will be setup within the look and feel of each ITV section and searches will be tailored to our user profile and habits to ensure optimisation and relevancy. ITV are looking forward to building the partnership with Yahoo and to look at other opportunities.?

In addition, Yahoo! will also include all of ITV.com?s diverse and continually changing online content through its content acquisition programme. This will ensure that Yahoo! UK & Ireland users will benefit by being able to easily find, for example, comprehensive online information about their favourite TV programmes from Coronation Street to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Notes to editor:

Content Match is Overture?s contextual advertising product that embeds relevant search results on content-based pages, featuring sponsored search listings generated by the company?s growing worldwide base of 100,000 advertisers.

• Yahoo! Search recently won two awards from Search Engine Watch for outstanding search service and best image search.
• Yahoo! Search is focused on providing innovative, useful technologies that enable people to find, use, share, and expand knowledge.

About Yahoo! UK & Ireland

Yahoo! UK & Ireland is a subsidiary of Yahoo! Inc., the No. 1 Internet brand globally and the most trafficked internet destination worldwide. Yahoo! provides online products and services essential to consumers' lives, and offers a full range of tools and marketing solutions for businesses to connect with Internet users around the world. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. Yahoo!'s global network includes 20 world properties and is available in 15 languages.

About ITV Sales

ITV Sales is dedicated to adding value to the 30-second spot proposition by delivering unique advertising solutions for its customers. Opportunities include broadcast sponsorship, branded content, online advertising, text services, interactive advertising, ?advertainment? and off-air marketing such as merchandising and licensing.

ITV Sales sells television airtime and programme sponsorship on behalf of all the ITV1 regions as well as ITV2, ITV3, ITV News Channel, Men & Motors and Irish terrestrial channel TV3. It also sells online sponsorship and digital media for ITV?s online properties as well as interactive TV opportunities.

About Overture

Overture Services, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo! Inc., offers essential marketing services for companies doing business online. The company's search-based products and tools help businesses connect with highly motivated customers. Overture is based in Pasadena, California with U.S. offices in New York, Chicago and San Mateo, CA. The headquarters for Overture's non-U.S. business is in Ireland, with offices across Europe, Asia, Australia and South-America. For more information about Overture, visit www.uk.overture.com. Overture is a service mark of Overture Services, Inc.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:11 AM | Permalink

July 25, 2005

Hispanics Loving Search Sites

In a post titled: Search is HOT for U.S. Hispanics, Nacho Hernandez posts a chart (via Ad Age) that he's been "waiting to see." It lists the "Top Web Properties Among All Hispanic Users." Time-Warner tops the list. Yahoo in second. MSN third. Google fourth. Ask Jeeves seventh.

Note: If you're interested in reviewing the complete "Hispanic Fact Pack" where Nacho found the numbers, it's available here for free (52 pages; PDF).

Posted by Gary Price at 3:10 PM | Permalink

July 13, 2005

Rediff.com CEO Talks Search

News.com has just published an interview with Ajit Balakrishnan, the CEO of the leading Indian portal (over 35 million registered users) Rediff.com. Lots of talk about Internet usage, social networking, mobile access to info, and e-commerce in India and China.

The interview concludes with Mike Kanellos and Elinor Mills asking Balakrishnan about web search.

News.com: Do you see any kind of competition from Google?

Balakrishnan: Google is the search king. There is no doubt about that. I think they've made some progress in India as well. But search volumes are relatively low in markets like India and China, and there is a very strong reason for that: commercial search volumes. The U.S. Internet economy has been built around e-commerce and there've been e-commerce sites here now for years. When you search for an iPod, there's a good chance that you would find 500 people offering that. When you have such a situation, then there's a role for product comparison sites. Commercial search in the United States accounts for about 20 percent to 30 percent of all searches. In countries like India and China, it's still very small--maybe 2, 3 or 4 percent.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:01 PM | Permalink

May 31, 2005

Finding Your Way Around in London

Search Engine Strategies London gets underway tomorrow, and all of us attending the conference will also be spending time navigating this ancient, sprawling city in search of food, drink and merriment. To help the out-of-towners get around, I've pulled together an article for today's SearchDay called Navigating London, with links to some of the best maps and other sources of local information for ye Olde Town. There's also a link to a very cool restaurant finder that not only helps you find a place to eat—it also shows you a 360 degree panorama of the eatery's interior so you can decide whether you like the ambience before you go.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:58 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

Blair "Liar" Linkbomb Highlights Country-Specific Skewing

About a month ago, Google Blogoscoped wrote of a link bomb that pushed UK prime minister Tony Blair's official biography to number one in a search for liar on Google. That is, if you use Google UK. Do the same exact search on Google.com, and the biography currently ranks fifth.

What's going on? It's not a case of having used the "Pages From The UK" option at Google UK to get UK-oriented results. This difference happens when using the default search "The Web" option at Google UK. In short, a search across the entire web at Google UK is not equal to a search across the entire web at Google's flagship Google.com site.

This isn't a Google-specific issue. The liar query underscores a big change that's snuck up on search users of several major search engines over the past year. Search engines have straying more and more into showing different results at the various country-specific versions they operate, even if country-specific results were not requested.

For Search Engine Watch members, I've posted an extended version of this story that looks at how and why these changes have happened, ranging from mirroring and censorship issues to specific ranking differences that are done in hopes of bettering the user experience.

Overall, I understand and can even applaud the desire to try and help users in a particular country get better results. But I think better disclosure that skewing is happening should be done if a user is choosing to search the entire web, when at a country-specific edition of a major search engine.

I'd also like to see all the major search engines ensure that if you go to a particular country-specific edition, regardless of where you are at, you see the same thing.

In other words, everyone who goes to Google UK should see the same thing, regardless of whether they are in the UK or not. The same for those going to Google US (FYI, Google says that's currently the situation).

The above is terms of editorial results. In terms of ads, I also think the search engines should provide options. If you want to see ads targeted at those in particular countries, when at a particular search engine, you should be able to say so. As an American who lives outside the US, I still have an interest in US-targeted ads. I'm hardly the only expat of any country like this.

My extended article on this topics for Search Engine Watch members is here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:51 PM | Permalink

February 25, 2005

French Survey On Search Marketing Up

ZDNet France and Imitiki have posted the results of a survey on search marketing issues in France. Search Engine Marketing Survey in France has the results in English, with questions ranging from is SEO important (95% say yes), to annual budget for SEO (most don't spend anything but time), to the use of sponsored links (a huge 30 percent said they never buy these) to main paid search provider (Google with a whopping 83 percent). Survey also in French, naturellement, via here (registration appears required). Want to discuss? Check out our forum thread, Search engine marketing survey in France.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:18 PM | Permalink

Dec. 2004 Top 20 Search Engines In UK

NetRatings has released a list of the top 20 search engines in the UK for December 2004, ranked in order of the number of unique searchers they had. Google comes first, followed by Yahoo, then Ask Jeeves.

The report also provides data on clickthrough per searcher, suggesting that the most popular search engine in terms of number of searchers isn't necessarily the most popular in terms of clickthrough to web sites.

For example, AltaVista was ranked 15th in terms for number of unique searchers. However, in terms of clickthrough per searcher, it was ranked third. Each unique searchers at AltaVista clicked 13.6 times in the month, compared to say 4.8 clicks per month at Lycos.

The idea is that you want to target both a search engine with traffic and high clickthrough, because if there aren't many clickthroughs, that traffic won't translate into visitors for you.

I guess. I find the data a bit confusing, however -- and wish I had time to analyze it more closely. I don't, but I'll at least post some of the questions I'm wondering.

• Clicks per searcher might be the wrong metric. Any unique searcher in a given month might do a number of different searches. One search might come up with the "right" answer and generate a single clickthrough. So low number of clicks -- but not an issue for the site that got the traffic.  
• Another search might generate several different possible answers, causing a person to click, come back to the search results, click again and so on. So clickthrough is high, but that doesn't matter to the sites that only got brief visits, because perhaps the search engine wasn't putting up the best results.  
• A better metric might be clickthroughs per search session. In any given search session, how many clickthroughs happened. Only a few might indicate a better degree of accuracy. Then again, perhaps not. High clickthrough could indicate a skew of people for a particular search engine who like to explore various options.

In the end, the stats are interesting, but most marketers will still probably find it useful mainly to see which search engines are ranked tops in the UK by unique searchers. Even better would have been ranking by volume of search.

The report (in PDF format) is here. NetImperative has coverage here: Bigger not always better for search.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:13 PM | Permalink

February 11, 2005

Australia's Ansearch Set for March Launch

Ansearch Set For March Launch We've been tracking Ansearch, a new search engine from Australia, since November. The ZDNet article: Fledgling Aussie search engine eyeing growth, says that Ansearch should officially launch in March. The article also offers details on how they say Ansearch works versus Google and other engines.

Speaking with ZDNet Australia yesterday afternoon, [Ansearch chief executive officer Dean] Jones posited that "a lot of people use Google because it’s the only one [search engine] that they know", but that "they’ve never been particularly happy with the results".

Posted by Gary Price at 10:34 AM | Permalink

January 11, 2005

NHN Plans to Stop Japanese Web Search Offering

NHN (the Korean search engine/portal) who just launched a desktop search app (see: Leading Korean Search Engine Launches Desktop Search App) is planning to stop offering web search in Japan on January 31, 2004. However, "portal, blog, and other services will continue to be offered..." NHN began offering search services in Japan in 2003.

According to Asia Pulse, NHN will no longer offer its search services in Japan because the company, "has been unable to dent Yahoo Japan Corp.'s dominance in the country." The article goes on to say that Yahoo Japan has about 80 to 90 percent of the country's search market.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:10 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2004

Seekport Expands Into UK Market

Seekport, a German company that has been offerering a search engine (using it's own crawler and index) aimed at users in France and Germany since June, has released a UK version. The company has plans to launch in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe during 2005. Pandia has just posted a Seekport overview article.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:41 PM | Permalink

December 7, 2004

eSearch For South African Queries

Looking to search for South African web sites? eSearch is a new site you might want to try, that came across my desk. It has a database of 4 million South African-related URLs, they tell me.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:08 AM | Permalink

December 5, 2004

My Ask Jeeves Comes to Jeeves UK

Ask Jeeves UK The MyAskJeeves "personal search system" is now available on the Ask Jeeves UK site.

MyAskJeeves UK offers the identical save, store, annotate, and organize services that are available on the .com site. MyAskJeeves launched in September on the .com site.

You can review what the MyAskJeeves and MyAskJeeves UK offer in our September overview: Ask Jeeves Serves It Your Way.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:33 PM | Permalink

September 28, 2004

Search Marketing: Reaching out to Europe

If you've concentrated your search marketing efforts in North America, you're missing out on one of the largest and most developed markets in the world. But reaching out to Europe should be a considered move, taking into account the cultural differences and nuances of SEM that can help--or hinder--your efforts.

In today's SearchDay article, Search Marketing in Europe, Patricia Hursh reports on a recent panel at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, offering an account of what it takes to have a successful search marketing campaign in Europe.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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